5 Turkish Pepper Types, From Maraş to Urfa Isot

What are Turkish peppers?

Local lines of Capsicum annuum, grown in amounts you'd hardly guess from the spice shelf. A 2018 study of Turkish pepper genotypes puts the country's yearly harvest at more than 2 million tonnes of green peppers and 16,139 t of dry ones, and calls Turkey one of the most important areas for pepper genetic resources¹.

The same study lists the pepper types its accessions came from: Sivri, Kapia, Charleston, Şanlıurfa, Hatay and Kahramanmaraş types¹. You'll notice the last three are place names, and two of those places turned their peppers into protected products. So the jar of flakes in your cupboard and the long green peppers Turks eat fresh, pickled or grilled¹ come from the same species, bred in different directions.

Which peppers does Turkey grow?

The table sorts the types by what you'll do with them. Turkey's patent office registers the Maraş pepper as a designation of origin², and its register for Urfa dishes names Şanlıurfa pepper as a geographical indication of its own³.

Pul biber means red pepper flakes, and Maraş biberi is the protected name for flakes from the six provinces in its register. The register also fixes what the fresh fruit looks like: conical, smooth, thin-fleshed, 60 to 115 mm long and 8 to 14 g each².

The 2018 study shows you how mixed the national pool is. Of its 71 accessions, 64 were C. annuum, six C. frutescens and one C. chinense, and the C. annuum lines did not cluster by region or by fruit shape¹. In plain terms, you can't tell a pepper's province from its DNA, which is one reason Turkey protects its peppers by place name instead.

How did peppers reach Turkey?

By trade, some time after Columbus. The 2018 study says nobody fully knows how Turkey first met the pepper, and that the most accepted idea has Portuguese traders on their way to Asia bringing it to Istanbul as a commercial product in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries¹. Like the Caribbean peppers you may know, Turkey's go back to American species; our peppers by country page traces the whole route.

How are Turkish pepper flakes made?

In the sun, mostly, and you could follow the same route at home. The Maraş pepper's register describes it from field to jar²:

1. 1

   Pick the ripe red pods from August

   Growers sow straight into the field in February or March and get two or three pickings, 2 to 3 tonnes of fresh fruit per decare.²

2. 2

   Dry them in the sun

   Whole pods on a tarp or drying cloth take about 8 to 12 days; washed and chopped pods on concrete or mesh take 1 to 3 days. Fan ovens do it in 3 to 4 hours, or 1 to 1.5 hours with microwave help. For a small batch of your own, the tarp method is the one you can copy.²

3. 3

   Crush them to size

   The dried pods go through a cracking machine set to the flake size the maker wants.²

4. 4

   Temper with oil and salt

   For red flakes (pul), makers work the crushed pepper under a millstone with vegetable oil and salt in Turkish Food Codex amounts, then sieve it by size.²

5. 5

   Or ferment it for isot

   For black flakes, makers let the crushed red pepper heat and ferment until it turns dark, then give it the same oil, salt and sieving.²

The thin flesh is what makes your flakes possible. The register says the Maraş pepper suits drying because its skin is thin, and it measures the flesh at only 1.2 to 1.6 mm². One dried pod goes three ways, and the diagram shows you where each jar comes from.

What does a Maraş pepper look like fresh and dried?

Long, conical and mostly water when fresh; dark red, light and dry once it's done. The register gives you a range for each stage, so you can see what the drying changes².

Your plant will stay small, about 60 cm tall, with white flowers and pods that turn from green to red as they ripen². If you grow a Maraş line at home, wait for full red before you pick for drying.

What is isot, and why is it black?

The isot in your jar is red pepper that makers sweat and ferment until it darkens. The Maraş register explains that crushed red peppers go through heating and fermentation that turns their natural red into a natural black, and that people call the result isot².

In Şanlıurfa you won't find these dishes without it. The register entry for Urfa liver kebab uses one tablespoon of Şanlıurfa pepper for 1 kg of lamb liver, sprinkled with salt over the coals, and serves more of it on the side³. The entry for Urfa isot çömleği, a lamb dish slow-cooked in a clay pot, names the fresh red Şanlıurfa pepper as its main distinguishing feature⁴.

Urfa's egg köfte shows you how much isot a home cook there uses. Its register recipe for six people kneads 230 g of Şanlıurfa pepper into 500 g of bulgur, with tomato paste, onion, black pepper, cinnamon and salt, for about 5 minutes and then 20 to 25 more before the fried eggs go in⁵. That's nearly half the bulgur's weight in pepper, far more than you'd use of a hot flake, which suggests isot sits at the mild end of the heat scale. The cooking with hot peppers pages cover the techniques you'll need for dishes like these.

How much fresh pepper makes a jar of flakes?

About four to five times what you end up with. The Maraş register says a pepper loses the water that makes up 75 to 80 % of its fresh weight as it dries².

The converter above runs the same sum for any jar you name. Worked through: 1,000 g × (1 − 0.80) = 200 g, and 1,000 g × (1 − 0.75) = 250 g. So your 100 g jar of flakes started as roughly 400 to 500 g of fresh red pods, before the oil and salt go in.

Run the köfte through the same sum and you see the scale of Urfa cooking: 230 g of isot for one batch started as roughly 920 to 1,150 g of fresh red pods²⁵. That's a kilo of peppers for one dinner you'd serve six people.

Pul biber or isot, which should you buy?

Choose by the color you want and by your dish. Red pul keeps the pepper's red for your dish and gets only oil and salt after cracking; isot goes through the extra fermenting step that turns it near-black². The Urfa register dishes, liver kebab and egg köfte, call for the Şanlıurfa pepper³⁵, so if you're cooking from an Urfa recipe, isot is your match. If you can't find either, the Urfa biber substitute page lists what stands in.

How hot are Turkish peppers?

We haven't found a primary heat figure for the Maraş or Şanlıurfa types. The register describes fruit size, color, moisture and the drying method², but not Scoville units, so we print none.

What we can tell you from the sources is that the small hot peppers mostly go to spice and condiment use¹. The Urfa biber and Maraş pepper entries add a heat range once we read one on a primary source. Until then, your best guide is the köfte amount above: cooks who knead 230 g into one bowl aren't working with a superhot.